I recently read a post by Adam Audette that was genuinely excellent – it was about maximising your click through rate in organic SERPs, by having very well presented search snippets. I’m always keen on having well written titles and meta descriptions, and I find it surprising that snippets in search results are, for the most part, pretty terrible. Check out SEOptimise’s excellent post on title tags if you’re looking for ways to improve there.

Patrick Altoft had an interesting tip about leaving the brand name out of the title tag – while this may not work for everyone, the idea is that for a generic keyword search (like “red widgets”), Google may display a title that’s optimised for that term. If the search term is branded, however (“Brand name”), then Google will most likely use the Dmoz title.

In a similar way, you can actually have multiple meta descriptions – potentially one for the keyword, and one for the brand name. This isn’t recommended for everyone, and I wouldn’t recommend it for many pages on your site, but it’s possible. The regular limit for meta descriptions to be displayed in full in Google is 156 characters (although I tend to stick to around 154 characters). I recently experimented with having a double length meta description – with the first snippet being designed to be well written for a generic keyword, and the second snippet written for a brand search. The full meta description for my homepage is this:

“Dave is a freelance SEO consultant, specialising in creative link building and in-depth technical site audits. To find out more, feel free to get in touch. Shark SEO is a search marketing blog with free advice on ranking your site better in Google, Bing & Yahoo. Check out the SEO blog today at SharkSEO.com.”

That’s twice the length of a regular meta description. Now check out the snippet for “freelance SEO consultant”:

And here’s the snippet for the search “Shark SEO blog”, which again returns the homepage:

When you put multiple snippets in the same meta description tag, it looks as if Google will use the snippet that’s most suitable for the query.

March 21, 2011 12:32 pm

March 21, 2011 12:52 pm

Wow, it`s really amazing. So it looks like Google reads the whole meta description(if it is longer) and chooses which part to show. Interesting does this have an effect for pages where the text in the SERP is not the description but a text from the page content.

March 21, 2011 5:04 pm

Here it did not work, when i search “Shark SEO blog” the snippet appears:
Dave is a freelance SEO consultant, specializing in creative link building and in-depth technical site audits. To Find Out More, feel free to get in touch.

March 22, 2011 4:04 pm

March 22, 2011 9:03 pm

I was thinking about something along the same lines recently. Was wondering what would happen if I had multiple meta descriptions designed for different query types. In the end I never got around to testing it (assumed search engines would only count the first one).
If it did work it would eliminate some of the careful construction required for an extended description.

May 19, 2011 9:05 am

[…] to other curious SEOs like SharkSEO we also know that you can write two completely different meta descriptions for the same page and the search engines will pick the description that best matches the keyword […]

August 17, 2011 10:45 pm

September 21, 2011 12:26 pm

[…] On any given day, there are hundreds of theories on what the right strategy is. Some from leading SEO sites, others from Google themselves. Don’t follow blindly – sometimes try the opposite of what is being suggested, just to see what happens. Google Suggest can’t be manipulated by anything else than search volume, right? Try something that is totally out of sync with what the leadig theories are. You may just find something new. […]

September 30, 2011 7:46 pm

Really interesting tactic. It’s interesting how Google pulled from the description, I just wonder if the length would affect your overall non-branded search traffic. Would be interesting to know how the variance of keywords changed for incoming organic traffic to your site.

December 9, 2011 1:54 pm

Hi,
I’ve tried this trick, but it doesn’t work with a site that I’m working on.
I mean, in organic searches, it appears just the first meta and the second one, for my second keyword it doesn’t shows… Should I create 2 meta content in my site to make it work? Any suggestions?
Thanks a lot & have fun with SEO 😉

March 17, 2012 3:47 am

Interesting concept…is this still working in early 2012? It seems like every new ‘trick’ is eventually ruined by marketers and then devalued with big G. I can see this being considered spammish….a fine line there.

April 10, 2012 2:23 pm

how many different descriptions can I use? Does that only work for a generic key and for a brand key? I tried four very similar descriptions and just changed the generic key. But it doesn’t work. Do you think it works better with totally different descriptions?

April 12, 2012 12:05 pm

Hi Thanks for the great post I have a strange issue though a client of mine has only 1 meta description for their homepage yet when i enter different keywords several different meta descriptions appear in the SERP’s – I recently changed the meta description but i find it very strange that there are 3 different descriptions appearing why could this be? As I said there is only 1 meta description present within the 150 character limit.. many thanks!

July 23, 2012 3:37 am

December 18, 2012 4:41 am

In response to Alex, in more and more situations Google is making its own decision on what to show for the decisions versus taking information from the meta descriptions tag. I can’t say I blame them, these tags were abused in the past.

March 29, 2014 7:56 pm

April 16, 2014 4:59 pm

[…] from SharkSEO – if you have a long meta description then Google will show the parts that are most relevant to […]

Posting your comment...

About Me

Shark SEO is a freelance SEO consultant who plays with search engines all the live long day. He likes coffee, designing clever linkbait and neglecting to update his SEO blog. He is not Jason Porter, or ecommerce analyst Matt Rhys-Davies